


Desert Music

by CytosineSkald



Category: Dune - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25494124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CytosineSkald/pseuds/CytosineSkald
Summary: It wasn’t that she hated where she was, it wasn’t that she was uncomfortable, and it wasn’t as though there was no singing in this palace-city. It was not that she was without — but it was somehow, even sung in her native tongue, unfamiliar. Foreign. Out-freyn.
Relationships: Paul Atreides/Chani Kynes
Kudos: 14





	Desert Music

**Author's Note:**

> A little Dune Messiah-era Chani because I can.  
> Originally written probably around 2016. Dug it up out of a file and thought I'd post it.

She missed the singing.

It wasn’t that she hated where she was (she had made a home of it, best she could), it wasn’t that she was uncomfortable (though the hunted, not-quite-Fedaykin part of her would always feel vulnerable sleeping outside the safety of rock walls), and it wasn’t as though there was no singing in this palace-city (distant, dissonant strings of rebaba, or the homely twang of ‘oud or baliset — a song of the jihad lifted up in melancholy voice longing for home, hanging strange on the air of the planet the lyrics yearned for). It was not that she was without — but it was somehow, even sung in her native tongue, unfamiliar. Foreign. _Out-freyn_.

She missed sitting on the back of a great worm, the Old Man of the Desert, singing travelling songs with the other women and their men. She remembered the _harj_ from Tabr to the palmaries of the south during the Desert War — a twenty-thumper journey, such distance with the wind against her skin and the old Dragon beneath them, and while in the _razzia_ troupes the duty would fall to one of the men, on a migration it had fallen to the women. So on this _harj_ she had called a worm, raised her voice, elative and ululating from the back of Shai-Hulud, and sang her call to action across the dunes as her uncle had done, as Usul had done, as her father had done, once — a cry she’d felt in her blood, calling back across generations of her people.

She had once on that journey bent down and pressed her ear and cheek against the great worm’s bark, felt the scrape of the dunes vibrate up through him, heard the great bellows-rumble from within, as he hummed a great baritone drone beneath the simple, repetitive melody the other women had taken to pass the time. Their voices had raised, nasal above the stillsuits, hands with water-ring tattoos on their fingers clapping and tapping jangling instruments against a melody that required the great worm’s moan to take its measure. She had had Leto then, and he hadn’t been able to lift his head, but he had seemed more at ease rocked to the moan of Shai-Hulud and the call-and-answer travel song — perhaps it had called to his blood, too.

Great Old Men like those worms avoided this, her home, now.

She could sit at her loom, quiet, painting pictures in thread and stories in warp and weft, of great heroes of the past, of the mythologies she had been told by her aunt Misra as a child before bed, that she had heard Harah telling her sons, that she had hummed to Leto when he fussed. Abu Zide who travelled to the Alam al-Mythal, the first Sayyadinas on Poritrin and Rossak, the story of Mas’oud al-Arnab, the trickster hero of Harmonthep. She could stand back and tilt her head and huff at the set of a thread, and hum to herself as she worked, but her hands missed sitting with a group of women, each with a small bowl of spice, chatting and humming whispers of melody as they processed that spice into fibre. (She remembered, far on the fringes of her memory, watching a woman with hands just a touch darker than her own tease thread like silk out of spice broth, and thinking it was magic — and she remembered the woman, her mother, maybe, laughing; ‘ _habibti, you will learn this magic one day.’_ ) She missed working-songs as they made stillsuits and maula pistols, poled the wind, planted their shrub grasses and tended the date palms. Songs of work that was hard, and demanding, exhausting and thankless, but fulfilling and familial.

She wasn’t unfulfilled — she could stand back from a finished piece and hum herself satisfied, feel the tickle of pride when Usul stood next to her and smiled at her work, naming the story as he ran hands over the figures (they both understood that Muad’dib would never have a place there on her tapestries, and they liked it better that way) — and she wasn’t without diverting work; always another piece of the Empire’s puzzle to slot into place, always more files to read and analyse and file away, motives to unravel and pick from the mire (like spice thread out of its broth), safe and sure in the understanding, the _knowledge_ ,that what she was doing was important, vital even, and that it protected what remained of her family and her people ( _broken, domesticated_ , a resentful part of her whispered against her brain, lips to grey matter, dragging her back to that wild Fremen blood-call of the steersman’s cry, _haiiii-yoh, geyrat, geyrat, geyrat_ and travelling songs). She was certain of her path — and only once had she stood back from her tapestry and sliced it end-to-end with her crysknife in a rage. She was proud of that.

Usul had noticed, and, even if he’d fingered the cut thread-ends of the figure of a woman and her son on a dune, said nothing.

It was better that way.

She missed the sound of his baliset, when he would sit with his eyes closed against the light and pluck a distracted melody from another world across the room. The melodic scale had sounded wrong to her ears the first while — not enough sharp and flat notes, a harmonic sensibility that was, for lack of something less ironic, alien. A sense of music from another star. (She had asked how far it was away, and he had said three hundred light-years from Arrakis, and she knew with her intelligence that it was vast but traversable, but her heart had answered instead with a dying woman’s grip on his hand like the distance might yawn between them and swallow him whole). Years had shifted his sense of melody from what she imagined rain on Caladan must have sounded like to the desert harmonics of her home, but when he was in decent spirits, she would still find him willing to smile with an echo of boyish mischief she had never quite seen before it had died, and sing an old Caladan bawdy for her. The sweet boy’s tenor had lowered to a man’s bassier tones, but it had always curled well around her own when she sang back lyrics she had learned from listening, and seemed to bring a certain edge of suppressed troublemaker’s joy in a partner in crime to him. It had been comforting, in those early days, even separated from her other music, to hear him, in moments of comfortable silence, pluck away distractedly at that baliset he had won from Jamis. It had told her she was home, even separated from everything that was home, even ripped from the rocks and the dunes and pacing plastone hallways and enduring deferential averted eyes ( _I witnessed the beloved of the mahdi_ , they would whisper to each other in the servants’ wing).

He didn’t play much anymore. Jamis’s baliset was abandoned in favour of worry lines and silent, self-contained rages, and welling despair she wondered if he forgot that she could _feel_ from across the room. He had his gifts, after all, and she wasn’t without hers.

And so she was left feeling homeless. This was fine, she told herself. She was the latest notch in a long line of Zensunni Wanderers, she told herself. Homelessness was the mark of their people. They had been the reviled tramps of the spaceways, she told herself, and the Sayyadina in her who could list the Wanderers’ homeworlds before Arrakis could feel their voices inside herself like echoes during spice orgies, echoes of a shared past, sine and cosine waves of spacetime in memory, ripples on the surface of genetic time that twisted in ripples of Fremen blood like unhooked spicethread linking together to be pulled into linear stories. In those threads of memory, there were echoes of travelling songs sung to the hum of engines that rumbled up through the hull of ships hurtling between stars, gaps three hundred light years wide.

But she had grown not in the cold liminal space of the Wanderers. She had grown in a sietch, crushed between smells and people in a warren called home.

And so she asked: to go back to the desert, to go home to the sietch. Maybe that would bring the music back. Steal out in the night and call a worm, sing travelling songs and coax him to sing with her, a triune melody between her Zensunni blood, the alien sensibilities of his home and the harmony of the Worm.

If only he hadn’t sounded so sad when he’d said yes.


End file.
